Since Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, we’ve been wondering who will lead the Java community. What sort of leadership is needed, and who will fill the shoes that, for better or for worse, Sun has occupied since Java was first released?

First, does the Java community need a leader? Significant portions of it are doing just fine without any “leadership,” most notably the people working on big data. Their attitude seems to be “have JVM, will do great stuff, don’t bother me with the politics.” And granted, the politics of the Java world over the past decade have been worse than tiresome. But everyone in the Java community relies on a JVM, languages, and libraries, and none of the smaller players have the capability of maintaining and developing these themselves. What happens to the community if the JVM stagnates?

Oracle’s community problem

Oracle’s problem has been simple: while they’ve made occasional overtures and peace offerings to the Java community, they’ve also been, well, abusive. One need look no further than the departure of the Apache Software Foundation and Doug Lea from the JCP when it became clear that Oracle viewed the community process merely as a means to rubber-stamp their decisions. (Doug still contributes to OpenJDK, though through a stand-alone process that is then integrated into releases.) It is certainly true that Oracle is a very large company that has never had to worry much about community relations. I doubt Oracle developers expect much say in the future of the Oracle database platform. It’s possible that this is just a cross-cultural faux-pas; I don’t think it’s Oracle’s intention to kick sand into their developers’ faces. I suspect it never occurred to Oracle’s highest levels of management that the community would care.

In a nutshell, that’s Oracle’s biggest challenge. Can they win the community over, and convince participants they are at least trying to engage? Much of the creativity in the Java world has come from the community members. The current explosion of JVM languages certainly didn’t originate at Sun or at Oracle, nor did most of the web frameworks in the Java space, nor did the thriving Hadoop ecosystem. At some point, developers may decide it’s just not worth the hassle to be in an ecosystem where they’re not respected as partners. There are alternatives: C#/Mono, the renaissance of the JavaScript space. It would be easy for enterprise developers to move to these alternatives. It would be more difficult (but not impossible) for large projects such as Hadoop or Cassandra to move. Oracle can’t be displaced because they own the JVM, but I don’t think they can assume the Java community won’t just go elsewhere.

The puzzle of Google and Java

Google’s attitude toward the Java community has been puzzling to me, though no doubt not to Googlers. Google is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Sun diaspora, having picked up Josh Bloch several years ago, James Gosling very recently, Tim Bray and many others along the way. They’ve also consistently been the most creative and innovative users of the Java platform: regardless of whether you like GWT (and I don’t), compiling Java to JavaScript is a brilliant and gutsy idea. App Engine’s platform-as-a-service support for Java was unparalleled until Amazon announced Elastic BeanStalk. And the crown jewel, Android, is clearly the most interesting thing in the Java world today. Java ME’s best hope for the future is to survive as a second-class citizen on Windows Phone 7. (I also see a sad future for a proud but fading mobile handset vendor, but that’s another story.) But Google has never shown any interest in taking a leadership role. Their attitude towards most of their Java projects can be summarized as “We invented it; we use it; we like it; if you want to try it, go ahead; we don’t particularly care whether it succeeds on a larger stage.”

Google supports an active user group program (GTUGs), but as you would expect, they cover the whole range of Google technologies, not Java as such. And, like most technology user groups, GTUGs are largely inward facing; they don’t create a lot of news on their own. Google’s presence in the Java community at large is surprisingly low key.

I’ve been puzzled by this attitude, though perhaps it isn’t strange. Google is a very large company that’s interested in many things, from medical records to self-driving cars. But they know exactly where their money is coming from, and that’s their advertising business. Projects that are related to selling advertising get marketing effort; projects that protect their ability to sell advertising in the future get marketing effort (I’ve argued that that’s the motivation behind Android, and it’s certainly somewhere in the background behind Chrome); but projects that are merely internal tools that they release to the public get short shrift. App Engine? Google is interested in providing tools to help developers build applications, but I don’t think they see App Engine as a moneymaker; they’re willing to let Amazon be the leader in cloud services. Contentious Java community relations? For Google, that’s a distraction. Google’s own Java developers are all the community it needs. Google has the resources to maintain its own JVM, should it come to that. That’s probably a reasonable corporate policy, but it does not do the Java community any good.

OSCON Java 2011, being held July 25-27 in Portland, Ore., is focused on open source technologies that make up the Java ecosystem. (This event is co-located with OSCON.)

VMware’s role in the Java world

VMware probably acquired more talent from the Sun diaspora than any single company. And they’ve also made some interesting purchases over the years: SpringSource gave them a viable alternative platform to Java EE, with the Groovy language thrown into the bargain. They have made some very important moves with their open cloud platform, CloudFoundry: an open-source platform as a service (PAAS) framework that features a wealth of open source frameworks, including Spring, Rails, Sinatra, Node.js, and Grails and other JVM-based technologies. Again, Java is so important to the enterprise computing space that building a cloud platform around Spring is a no-brainer. But outside of the Spring community, VMware has played their cards close to their chest. Am I the only person who has had trouble figuring out where they’re going or what they’re doing?

VMware’s aims are not unlike Google’s. They have more to be gained from the success of their properties — Spring and Grails are much more than tools for internal use. But they’re very focused on larger corporate goals, as they try to move from domination of the virtualization world to domination of cloud computing. Their latest purchases show that they see the cloud as providing corporate applications to end users. With the addition of Socialcast to their portfolio, it’s clear they see that cloud computing is essentially social, and that thriving companies must have a social component. All this is well and good, but it’s a strategy that can succeed with or without Java. While they have a definite interest in seeing Java’s Open Source community prosper, as far as I know they haven’t shown any interest in the community as a whole. They’ve bought companies formed around open source projects, but they haven’t, at least up until Cloud Foundry, started any projects of their own. And while Cloud Foundry provides a great platform for running Java applications in the cloud, it isn’t itself a Java project: it’s written largely in Ruby on Rails and Erlang.

So while VMware has an important role in the Java community, they’re not a Java company as such. Indeed, they’re using what they see as the best tool for the job. That’s certainly a good practice, and perhaps the hard lesson we’ve learned after a decade or so of language wars. VMware has talent and some wisdom — but as a company, I don’t think there’s a desire to be a community leader.

What do we want from a Java community leader?

Perhaps we should be asking the bigger questions: What do we want from a community leader? Is that role necessary at all, or is it just a holdover from Sun’s often inept attempts to deal with the movement they created? I’ve already mentioned maintenance of the JVM, and the job of pushing it (and the language) into the future. We’ve debated new language features long enough; at some point, someone had to own the job of implementing Java 7, with closures or without. Oracle has taken on that task, and succeeded. I think they’ve made some hard decisions, and good ones: deferring closures until Java 8, while keeping the invokedynamic bytecode instruction that makes it easier to implement dynamic languages in the JVM. Bringing Java 7 to closure (if not bringing closures to Java 7) is a significant achievement, and something that could have wandered on for years under Sun’s leadership.

But is that all we want? Sun’s tenure as leader of the Java community was stormy, with Sun probably not getting enough credit for keeping the fractious participants together. As I said many times, the JCP was the “least dysfunctional standards group out there.” But that came at a cost. In my admittedly idiosyncratic reading, the train-wreck that was EJB 2 came from Sun’s inability to say “no” to powerful vendors, who wanted certain kinds of features. If you remember JINI (and you probably don’t), Sun’s marketing told a bizarre story about Jini-enabled Internet refrigerators, rather than treating it as an enterprise technology that would compete with J2EE. As a result, JINI died a slow death. The history of Java is littered with initiatives (Java Media; Java Communications; even JavaFX, in which Oracle has taken a renewed interest) that Sun hyped briefly because it fit their strategy du jour, then dropped.

I’m not asking for Oracle, Google, or VMware to re-start any of these dead technologies. That’s probably water over the dam, though should it happen, I’d be cheering. But being a technology leader doesn’t just mean declaring yourself a leader and standing in front of the parade. You have to understand where the parade is going and lead. And that’s a deeper role than just pushing the Java language and the JVM into the future. It requires understanding what developments are important, and valuing those developments for what they are even if it conflicts with your own story. It requires pushing back against other JCP organizations that “need” arcane features at the cost of sane design. And it requires doing so without appearing to abuse the good will of the millions of developers working with, and on, Java. Are any of the companies in the Java community willing to exercise this kind of technical leadership? Are there any organizations willing to think about what features the Java platform really needs, and bring those ideas to fruition? That’s what we need for leadership in the Java community. It’s time for the real leader to stand up.

You make some very good points about Java leadership, or lack of, in your article. Maybe Java’s current steward should get more time to evolve JVM and the Java language. One can only imagine how difficult it must be to enforce changes onto software development system and virtual machine that is used for Web and software development by enterprises and companies all over the world. That is a world that might prefer stability over anything else.

Peter Kelley

I think that you missed one important player in your analysis: IBM. IBM has been a big player in the Java space right from the beginning and they gave birth to one of the premier development tools platforms Eclipse. IBM was looking to buy Sun just before Oracle did and many in the industry feel that IBM would have been a better owner for Java than Oracle. IBM has some very significant investments in Java technology and an active open source and open standards culture. The question remains what are they doing to establish leadership in the Java community?

I agree, any discussion about leadership and Java that does not include IBM is significantly incomplete. Disclaimer: I work for IBM.

Drive McRazey

I hope this whole Java thing just self destructs. The fact that this language has taken off just proves that many of the demotivators at despair.com (like achievement, idiocy) are true. From the inception of Fortran in 1956, this langauge is the result of over 50 years of brilliant progress in computer language design. Surely we can do far better than Java.

Matt Cauthon

Java ME possible on Windows Phone 7??? You clearly have no idea what Windows Phone 7 is about. That isn’t going to happen. Ever.

Martin Krohn

I think java will be end up like Delphi. Next!

Anonymous

Again Microsoft win here as C# is becoming more and more powerful and is used in may of today’s largest corporate environmanets.